Brisbaneness

Client
Various
Year
2014–present
Location
Brisbane

Lessons from a New World City.

We don’t make a secret of the fact that when Right Angle started we weren’t intending to work in the dark arts of property development. What began as a very scrappy network of indie city-guides accidentally spun into a global urban innovation company and strangely enough, even though Ground Zero is Melbourne, Brisbane was the point of inflection where we realised that our kind of city-knowing could serve more people than your average hipster wanting free beer at an art gallery. Perhaps it's not that strange, because if anything Brisbane has a spirit of it can be done.

Now, after over a decade of city-making in the Queensland capital, we have built a pattern of knowledge – a well-researched and honed sense of what ‘Brisbaneness’ is and an aptitude for converting that into visions and strategies for places within the city.

The following set of roughly sequential project insights demonstrate some of the more significant projects we’ve worked on in Brisbane, and how knowledge accumulates slowly over time to the advantage of a placemaker. As Brisbane heads towards its Olympic moment this is definitely a city where we want to be working.

King Street, RNA Showgrounds

We’d never worked in property before Lendlease approached us for advice about the retail offer at RNA Showgrounds. So, we learned what a masterplan was, wondered why it didn’t really relate to the emerging culture of The Valley and pulled together a coalition of local retail trend leaders to discuss how a new development could better connect with the more established cultures of the surrounding city.

Brisbane International Airport

We then partnered with local architectural wunderkinds Richards & Spence to win a project redesigning the retail at Brisbane International. Using the ludicrous but smart concept of ‘the world’s most liveable airport’ we argued that if airports were judged by the same liveability criteria as cities, we wouldn’t have so many placeless airports.

We defined the culture, style and commerce of Brisbaneness as cardinal points for the redesign exercise, ultimately leading to a retail environment that was the opposite of the hackneyed ‘exit via the duty-free shopping’ experience.

Woolloongabba Cross River Rail Precinct

In the future, driving a car will be like smoking a cigarette. You can do it, but people will think poorly of you. Brisbane is addicted to cars, but if anything can change this behaviour it’s Cross River Rail, a project providing the city with a world-class metro system.

In what felt a bit like a rear-guard action, we were integrated into the Woolloongabba Station Precinct to define a place and retail vision for a site response that had already been designed. Never ones to bitch and moan about being late to the party, we went about the task of humanising a monolithic site with an overlay of retail.

Kangaroo Point Green Bridge

In one of our more unusual projects, we helped the BESIX Watpac team develop a design, retail and public realm concept that won them the bid to deliver Kangaroo Point Green Bridge for the Brisbane City Council. Guided by the belief that this particular bridge should be both a destination and thoroughfare, we demonstrated how to embed retail and public experiences at key locations along the span, and how that new business would be additive to the broader commercial ecology along the waterfront.

Waterfront Brisbane

Brisbane’s CBD is blessed and cursed. It has an amazing river, but the trouble is it floods often and in biblical ways. It has a beautiful climate, but the trouble is that it’s only at certain times of the day and in particular months of the year. It has a prodigious blue-chip commercial tenant base, but the trouble is Melbourne and Sydney are always trying to cut its grass.

All these blessings and curses come to bear on Waterfront Brisbane, Dexus’ $2.1bil investment in the future of the city’s CBD. We’ve been helping refine a vision for the public life of this development, maximising its contribution to the city and in so doing, creating the most compelling workplace precinct possible.

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